The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack. Or, given that I am talking about the loss of Cadbury to US food giant Kraft, perhaps it should make the dry, unmistakable snap of a chocolate finger, or the beautiful, ­cacophonous roar that fills the ­inside of your head when you bite into the frangible delight-stick that is the Cadbury Crunchie.

I have measured out my life with chocolate bars, real and ­imagined. (Blimey, do you see that? ­Shakespeare and TS Eliot pressed into service within two ­paragraphs! That's quality, that is.) When I was growing up, a finger of Fudge was ­famously just enough to give your kids a treat – and, presumably ­inadvertently, a variety of playground jokes – though in practice the Curly Wurly more often ­functioned as the introduction (or, for a certain percentage of us, gateway drug) to the world of chocolate. Wonka's Whipple Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight lived in our minds as the platonic ideal of the ­cocoa-based art form and took on an even more glorious aura when we learned in his autobiography, Boy, that its inventor, Roald Dahl, had been one of the schoolboy tasters for Cadbury during his days at ­Repton. He may even have been among the first people ever to taste the Crunchie, launched in 1929, when he was 13. (Imagine that! I bet even getting his hands on Patricia Neal two decades later didn't begin to compete with such a moment.)

I looked forward to the day when I would be one of the grown-ups ­enjoined by Miriam Margolyes as the chocolate-voiced Cadbury bunny (her lapincarnation? Oh yes, baby, it's quality here today all right!) to relax at the end of a hard day's work by taking it easy with Cadbury's ­Caramel. My then 15-year-old cousin, David, secured his ­immov­able first position in my list of ­familial affections by depositing ­before me and my sister on a pub ­table in Preston, Easter Sunday 1983, two giant handfuls of Creme Eggs. Half a dozen each tumbled out in a riot of glittering gold, ruby red and sapphire blue, better than any jewels. We gazed at him in speechless awe at the grandiosity of the gesture. "Awreet," he said, nodding. He turned on his heel and was gone.

This belies the fact that, as with all sensuous pleasures, of course, I was a late starter with chocolate. I was 14 before I bought and consumed an entire bar by myself. Until then, my mother had doled out the treats with a hand guided by natural parsimony, memories of rationing and ­innate mistrust of any sensation that fell short of acute mental ­anxiety or physical pain. Wafer-thin slices of confectionery came our way, on weekends only. A finger of Fudge in our house was enough to give two kids a treat for anything up to three months. The Curly Wurly was a chocolate-covered ladder to mortal sin. I got the last one of those dozen Creme Eggs for my birthday last year.

And I was 108 before I first had sex.

But where were we? Ah yes, the loss of Cadbury to Kraft. Could there be a more inappropriate pairing? Cheese people and chocolate people don't go together – except, of course, at Weight Watchers. And even there they stare at each other across an unbridgeable sweet and savoury divide.

And Kraft is foreign. American now, German back in the day. Neither country would be your first port of call when seeking the compassionate protection of your cultural ­heritage. In neither language does, "Hands off the subtle evocations of memory enshrined in a reassuringly robust chunk of Dairy Milk" fully translate. When Boots fell to foreign takeover a few years ago, with it went my long-treasured dreams of restarting its library service. That was hard, but I can live without dreams. If Crunchies and Creme Eggs melt away, too, life will be reduced to mere existence. The stockpiling starts here.